Children and youth who do not participate in aggressive behavior toward peers are present during the majority of episodes of bullying. They may serve as defenders who enact prosocial behaviors toward victims including comforting and supporting victims, intervening, getting help, or encouraging victims to get help; however they rarely intervene. What individual factors and what contexts may make some children stick up for the victim, while others remain uninvolved, is a relatively new area of research. This presentation will review our research on children’s bystander behavior to provide individual and contextual explanations of defending behavior. Results will be presented within a social-ecological framework and implications for anti-bullying programs will be also discussed.

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tobias Rothmund (University of Koblenz-Landau, Campus Landau, Germany): The Violent Video Games Debate – Media Effects Research and Its Public Understanding

During the last 30 years a substantial body of empirical research has investigated the potentially detrimental effects of exposure to violence in video games. The state of evidence has repeatedly been reviewed using meta-analytic methodology and most recent analyses provide strong and consistent evidence for small effects of video game violence on aggressive cognition, affect and behavior (Anderson et al., 2010; Greitemeyer & Mügge, 2014). I want to address two research questions that follow up on these meta-analytic findings. First, how does exposure to video game violence operate in the short-term and in the long-term? What are the underlying psychological processes? In the General Aggression Model (Anderson & Bushman, 2002), different pathways of media violence effects are distinguished. However, empirical studies have strongly emphasized the role of priming-based social cognitive pathways that are derived from Cognitive Neoassociation Theory (Berkowitz, 1989). Based on of our own research on short- and long-term effects of media violence I want to discuss some empirical shortcomings of these priming-based theoretical accounts. The second focus will be on a public understanding of science perspective: Why is the state of evidence (even in the face of the present meta-analyses) still discussed so controversially in the general public? Research findings are presented that shed light on why people differ so strongly in how they evaluate the state of evidence on video game violence. The presentation will focus especially on how motivated processing and understanding of scientific evidence can account for these differences.

Many children and adolescents are involved in cyberbullying, a subform of aggressive behavior carried out in cyberspace (Livingstone et al., 2011). Research has already demonstrated negative consequences for school-aged children involved in cyberbullying and doubtless, there is a need for evidence based intervention and prevention programs (Flay, et al., 2005). Unfortunately, longitudinal and experimental evidence regarding risk and protective factors for cyberbullying, or effective coping strategies of cyber victims, is rare which may hinder the construction of specific cyberbullying prevention programs. Nevertheless, consistent research documents the cross-sectional co-occurrence of cyberbullying with bullying (Kowalski et al., 2014) and mechanisms of cyberbullying and bullying are similar (Gradinger, Strohmeier & Spiel, 2012). As a consequence it is conceivable that prevention programs for bullying are also effective in preventing cyberbullying (e.g. Williford et al., 2013). Therefore, the presentation will highlight quality criteria for evidence based intervention and prevention programs and review current evidence regarding longitudinal risk and protective factors for cyberbullying. Also, evidence based prevention efforts against (cyber)bullying will be presented, which involve the whole school.

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